With the beginning of chapter 8, we move from the first large block of discourse to the first large block of narrative material; or in other words, we move from the first collection of teachings of Jesus to the first major collection of stories about Jesus’ public ministry. These are stories about Jesus’ miracles, in particular healings and exorcisms. The evidence of Josephus (which probably had an authentic form, although its present form has clearly been revised by Christian copyists) agrees with Matthew’s (and the Synoptic Gospels’ in general) portrait of Jesus as having been a teacher and a miracle worker. This is clearly how he was remembered in general, and not just by his followers.
The
text in Josephus, if what are obviously Christian additions are removed, reads
as follows:
About
this time
there lived Jesus, a wise man who wrought surprising feats and was a
teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and
many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men
of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified,
those who had in the first place come to love him did not cease. And
the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still up to now,
not disappeared.
It is certainly legitimate to ask about how we should understand the miracle stories in relation to issues raised in the modern world, whether issues raised by scientific skepticism or New Age superstition and credulity. But as with everything else, it is crucial that we first put Jesus the miracle worker in his original context and understand what those who read Matthew’s accounts of his miracles would have understood. We shall focus therefore on a literary and cultural/contextual approach. As with so many aspects of these stories and of ancient literature in general, the historian faces a problem: either these events are explicable and therefore less than what many believers mean by ‘miraculous’, or they are inexplicable and thus historians can say nothing significant about them in their role as historians. But be that as it may, recent research has been much more open to accepting that, however one is to explain the miracle stories in relation to other issues, it is clear that Jesus was renowned in his own time as a healer and exorcist. Whether any or all of the illnesses were psychosomatic, whether their faith healed them because faith has a positive effect on the immune system, whether by virtue of being the Messiah one can therefore defy the laws of gravity – all these issues are important in terms of reflecting and presenting the Christian faith today. But these were not the issues of either Matthew or his readers, and thus there is a sense in which they fall under the category of apologetics (and perhaps also systematic theology), but are not central to exegesis.
In the Synoptic Gospels, no one seriously disputes that Jesus in fact did miracles. The only question that is raised is by what power Jesus accomplishes these feats. The accusation that one practices what is essentially ‘black magic’ was a dangerous one that most non-conformist miracle-workers in the ancient world faced sooner or later: it meant labeling them as deviants and dangerous, and this was one way the establishment could neutralize the dangerous charismatic authority of such a person. Other figures in the ancient Greco-Roman world who are said to have done similar things to Jesus also faced similar accusations (a notable example being Apollonius of Tyrana). And so it is not surprising that slightly later on (see Matthew 9:34; 12:24) those who feel threatened by Jesus’ popularity engage in such attempts at neutralizing him. Matthew thus at times eliminates elements in Mark’s accounts that might have left Jesus open to charges of magic. Jesus’ practices were clearly not for the most part like those of typical Jewish or Greco-Roman magicians, who called on God by as many different names as possible, prepared ointments and potions, and sought by using the right methods and words to manipulate divine or angelic powers to perform their will. Jesus heals with simply a word, or a touch (and the few instances of Jesus using spittle or other techniques that resemble those of contemporary magicians are removed by Matthew – see Mark 7:33-34; 8:23). But at any rate, the term ‘magic’ was primarily one of ‘name-calling’ rather than objective evaluation, of declaring the wonder-worker as beyond the bounds of what is acceptable in society, and thus this term occurs nonetheless in Jewish and Roman polemic against Christians in the subsequent centuries.
For
discussion of the miracle tradition in the Gospels and their contemporary
setting see also the following excerpt from a workshop at Harvard University by
L. Michael White:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/symposium/magic.html
Matthew changes the order of the material he takes over from Mark. He does this to emphasize some of the most important aspects (from his perspective) of Jesus’ healings. And so he begins with two stories that show Jesus interacting with those beyond the fringes of Jewish society, the unclean, moving a story from Mark to a place before the one that appears to have immediately followed the large group of ‘Sermon’ material in Q. A person with a skin disease like eczema was considered unclean and would have been prohibited access to the Temple and would have been shunned by many. The disease in question is not Hansen’s disease (what we call ‘leprosy’ today), for which there was another term, but simply refers to some form of skin disease. To any who, like the Pharisees, sought to avoid contracting ritual uncleanness on a day-to-day basis and not only when they were going up to the Temple, people with skin diseases needed to be avoided at all costs, because ritual uncleanness was ‘contagious’ even though the disease was not. Once again, we need to understand the meaning of these interchanges in a pre-scientific world without our modern medical knowledge.
Jesus’ healing of the man was clearly something significant, but not necessarily unheard of. What would have been most striking (and this is the reason Matthew places the story so prominently) is that Jesus touched this unclean person in making him clean. This rabbi was therefore clearly something different than the Pharisees. This would become even clearer once they saw him eat and drink with sinners and other outcasts, but such actions were not ‘one off’ events in Jesus’ ministry: they were deliberate, calculated declarations that Jesus has a different mission and a different vision than the Pharisees. Jesus was not about restricting access to the exclusive dinners of the pure. He was, on the contrary, about foreshadowing the eschatological messianic banquet at which people with eczema, Gentiles, tax collectors, prostitutes, and various other undesirables would be present, while many of the respectable and ritually clean figures of influence in contemporary Jewish society would find themselves excluded.
[What follows is based on my NT Background class
notes found at: http://www.oocities.org/jamesfrankmcgrath/alliance_nt_background/NTB_3_Pharisees.htm]
In order to understand the teaching and actions of Jesus, it is necessary to know something about the Pharisees; to understand Matthew’s Gospel, it is also important to understand the developments within the Pharisaic movement even after Jesus’ own time. The Pharisees are probably the group within first-century Judaism that we are most familiar with, since they make regular appearances in the Gospels. Yet it is precisely this familiarity that is what can cause problems. Today, if one looks in the dictionary, one will find ‘Pharisee’ there, and its definition will be ‘hypocrite’. This stems from Jesus’ criticism of them in the New Testament, but it should also be clear that Jesus is giving a negative evaluation of a group that has its origins in a movement of people who during the Maccabean crisis were willing to die rather than disobey God. That a group with such noble origins could within less than two centuries come to be criticized so severely should cause us to stop and think. It also warns us against any simplistic understanding of the Pharisees as being like ‘the other guys’, not like us. It is essential that we understand both who they were and what they were doing wrong if we are to understand the power and relevance of Jesus’ words about them for us today.
Thanks to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, we know that during this period in history there were roughly 6,000 Pharisees, making them the largest ‘party’ within Judaism in this period. This information challenges a common misconception, namely that most Jews in Jesus’ time were Pharisees. In fact, most Jews in New Testament times had ‘no denominational affiliation’. The Pharisees were influential, and within a few centuries their program for Judaism would come to dominate what eventually became ‘orthodox’, Rabbinic Judaism. But during this time period they are simply one movement in an extremely diverse Judaism. They could not be regarded as the defenders of Jewish orthodoxy, because there was no such thing during this period. Of course, there were common denominators such as belief in one God, in God’s covenant with Israel, in the importance of the Law. But there were also crucial differences of opinion regarding where and how the one God should be worshipped, and on how the Law should be interpreted and implied. There was probably as much diversity in early Judaism as there is in Christianity today. The Pharisees, although widely respected, were not universally recognized leaders of Judaism. The situation in early Judaism has been compared to the multi-party system in America today. There will have been a few groups that were particularly popular, but also many small groups. Even the biggest will not have represented everyone. Just as today neither Democrats nor Republicans can say ‘we are the only truly American party’, neither could the Pharisees have said this. OK, they could have said it, but it wouldn’t have been true. It is important to distinguish between propaganda and reality. The later followers of Hillel try to give the impression that pretty much everyone agreed with them from the outset. The reality is much more complicated.
So what does the name ‘Pharisee’ mean? It doesn’t mean ‘hypocrite’. It almost certainly comes from the Hebrew prushim meaning ‘separated ones’. In other words, this name means something like ‘separatists’. A good question to ask is whether this was a name they chose for themselves, or a nickname given by others. ‘The separatists’ is not a name that most religious groups would choose for themselves, although I suppose there are many today who quite proudly wear the label ‘fundamentalist’. At any rate, it is interesting to note that the later Rabbis call their founding fathers ‘the sages’, and they use the term ‘pharisees’ to label groups they consider to be kind of extremists. So here again we see that Jesus was probably not the only one to criticize certain extremes within the Pharisees. There were probably other critics, both within and outside the movement. Yet we should not neglect the fact that these were for the most part serious people, presumably many of them were well-meaning and good-intentioned. They had a reputation as being careful about obeying God’s Law. And thus, while we hear the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and know who the hero is supposed to be; the expectations of Jesus’ contemporaries would have been reversed. [If you want to hear the parable and feel its original effect, simply replace the Pharisee and the tax collector with an Evangelical pastor and a Muslim fundamentalist. I think you’ll get the point].
There was certainly a lot of diversity within the movement itself. In the early first century two of Pharisaisms most influential teachers lived and taught, namely Hillel and Shammai. They founded the two main schools of Pharisaism that lasted for at least most of the next century. Shammai’s school was stricter and seems to have predominated in the first century, whereas Hillel’s less strict teaching came to predominate in what later became Rabbinic Judaism. There is a famous story that a Gentile came to Shammai and said ‘I would like to learn Torah [i.e. the Jewish Law], but only as much as you can teach me while I am standing on one leg’. The story (told by followers of Hillel) says that Shammai picked up a stick and chased him away. When the same Gentile came to Hillel and said ‘Teach me Torah, but only as much as I can learn while standing on one leg’, Hillel is said to have replied ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor’. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now, go and learn’. This story is helpful inasmuch as it shows that not all in first century Pharisaism were unaware of what was of fundamental importance in the Law. Not all were gross caricatures of legalism. It is also interesting to compare this summary of the Law with that offered by Jesus slightly later. He said something similar, but put it in positive terms: rather than saying ‘don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you’, he said ‘do to others what you want them to do you’. The difference is important; yet the similarities between Jesus and some of his contemporaries in the movement of the Pharisees are also interesting.
In the New Testament, scribes and Pharisees are closely associated. The two are not synonymous, however. The scribes were those who made a living out of knowing how to do something that very few in the ancient world could: read and write. Obviously, groups like the Pharisees and Sadducees whose beliefs focused on the interpretation of the Law needed to have scribes among their members, experts in the Law precisely because they could read and thus instruct and inform others. It is possible that many who followed the Pharisaic way of life were or became scribes; but it is also clear that not all Pharisees were scribes, nor were all scribes Pharisees.
The differences between the ‘parties’ in Judaism in this period are not exactly like the differences between Christian denominations and sects today. The focus was less on what we would tend to call ‘doctrine’ and more on interpretation of the Law. However, there were certainly a few doctrines that set the Pharisees apart from other parties like the Sadducees (it is unclear to what extent the majority of Jews did or didn’t agree with the Pharisees on these points). One important doctrinal difference was the Pharisees’ belief in the resurrection. Resurrection as a Jewish doctrine appears relatively late in the Jewish Scriptures, and some (such as the Sadducees) regarded it as an illegitimate and unbiblical innovation. There is some evidence that this belief was very popular and not limited to the Pharisees. It is also a clear point of agreement between the Pharisees and Jesus.
A clear point of difference and disagreement between the Pharisees on the one hand and others like Jesus or the Sadducees on the other was the emphasis the Pharisees put on the oral Law, the traditions of the fathers. All of those who have a system of beliefs that focuses on a book also have some kind of oral tradition – answers to difficulties, harmonizations, interpretations, explanations, etc. The Pharisees, however, had such beliefs as an explicit set of traditions that they carefully passed down, discussed and interpreted. Eventually, these traditions came to be written down in the Mishnah (around 200 CE) and then later others were written down, along with explanations and commentary on the Mishnah, in the Talmudim (around 500-600 CE). It is clear that these writings preserve traditions going back to Jesus’ time, but not all of it does, which is why the Rabbinic literature can only very cautiously be used to shed light on topics relating to the background of the New Testament.
One of their aims was to build a ‘hedge around Torah’: for example, if the real sin is to misuse God’s name, they thought: let’s build a protective barrier a few yards from that sin and simply not use God’s name at all, so that no one inadvertently misuses the divine name. If you criticize them for this, I hope you use the New Jerusalem Bible, one of the few modern translations that does not carry on the rabbinic custom of using ‘LORD’ rather than ‘Yahweh’ in the Jewish Scriptures. People also wanted to know what the Law required of them. For example, they knew that they are prohibited to work on the Sabbath, but what exactly is work? The Torah Scholars (traditionally called ‘scribes’) and Pharisees offered definitions (carrying a pen…if you are a scribe, could be work!).
[See also Mark 7:11; Matt 15:5. Note also m.Nedarim 9:1, where the majority opinion seems to be that honoring one’s parents does take precedence over the law of oaths. It is thus important to remember that in the Gospels Jesus is often disagreeing with some rabbis over against others.]
1) Make Law more explicit through definition. The question ‘Who is my neighbor?’ expected a rabbinic-type answer: ‘A Jew and not a foreigner; if it is the Sabbath day then only someone who is not further than X distance from your home, etc.’ Jesus’ answer challenges this approach by rejecting narrowing definitions and posing the issue as broadly as possible: ‘Who would you like to be your neighbor? To whom are you a neighbor?’
2) To find loopholes, which they presumed God had left with a purpose. Example: Jubilee year, people didn’t lend to the poor even though God specifically addressed this in the Law. They thus found a way to avoid the canceling of debts by allowing people to deposit their ‘debt notes’ with the Temple and pick them up again after the Jubilee year. The rabbis found this loophole in order to help the poor: some would not live through the Jubilee year unless someone lent them money! Yet in doing this, we see how a Law was essentially made null and void by their tradition, and the spirit of that law was obscured.
3) The Pharisees were also
known for their leniency in applying capital punishment – they sought to avoid
it wherever possible. Josephus mentions this (See Josephus, Antiquities. 13,294; E. P. Sanders, Judaism,
p.419-420), and it can also be seen in the NT. In Acts 5, we
read that the apostles were persecuted by the high priest and Sadducees
(5:17,21), whereas the Pharisee Gamaliel recommended that they be left alone
(5:33-40). The Pharisees’ strictness in interpreting the Law did not
necessarily imply mercilessness (One wonders in light of this whether, in John
7:53-8:11, the Pharisees wanted to show that Jesus is merciless rather than
vice-versa. Perhaps many of those older men who left immediately were Pharisees
who were genuinely impressed with Jesus’ response).
Since the Pharisees didn’t control what went on in the Temple, they moved the realm of the sacred into the home. This is not to say that they actually tried to keep all the laws of priestly purity in day-to-day life, but they certainly at the very least made token gestures in that direction. They seem to have formed associations (haburot) who agreed together to eat only food that was properly tithed and eaten in a state of priestly purity.
For Jesus meals were also important and symbolic: Jesus’ table fellowship brought together sinners, the unclean, and people of very different social status as well. While the Pharisees were seeking to bring about reform by more clearly defining who the obedient people of God are, Jesus was in a sense opening the door wide and saying ‘whosoever will may come’, welcoming people even before they had completely reformed, offered sacrifice, or done the other things that would have been considered ‘official proof’ of repentance. It was perhaps on the issue of purity that Jesus differed most dramatically from the Pharisees. Thus his first major public action after teaching, the touching of an unclean person, was a direct defiance of everything the Pharisees considered important. [On this topic, see further Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994, pp.49-58; E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE – 66 CE, Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992, pp.214-230, and the sections on purity in E. P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah, Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990].
Johannan
ben Zakkai, the leader of restored (Pharisaic) Judaism in the period after the
destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, worked in Galilee for 18 years without
managing to have much impact in advocating Pharisaic teaching, and so he is said
to have exclaimed: “Galilee, Galilee, you hate Torah!” It is interesting
that Galilee had a reputation for representing a non-Pharisaic view of Judaism
and the Law. These are presumably the traditions that Jesus grew up being
familiar with! Note also the disdain for the common people and Galilee in
John’s Gospel (cf. e.g. John 7:48-49).
It is crucial to avoid stereotyping the Pharisees. They were not all self-righteous legalists who were concerned with ridiculously insignificant religious rituals. There is no reason to think that there were any more legalists in first century Judaism than there are in 21st century Christianity. That there were some who were self-righteous in the modern sense is clear, and those who were are criticized not only by Jesus, but also by Rabbinic tradition as well. Jesus’ disagreement with the Pharisees was about purity, about boundaries, about priorities. Jesus, by including the unclean in his fellowship, was stating that the unclean will be part of God’s eschatological kingdom. The concentric circles of ritual purity around God that the Law and the Temple symbolized were being redrawn. This was as radical as an attempt to redraw the lines between castes in India. In this sense, Matthew recognizes as much as Paul does how radical Jesus’ teaching and example were. And so Matthew starts off by describing Jesus touching a person with eczema or a similar skin disease. When he goes on to emphasize in 9:13 that Jesus taught that God desires mercy and not sacrifice, this shows what he had in mind. The Pharisees of Matthew’s time, faced with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, also emphasized Hosea 6:6. There were many points of agreement between Jesus and the Pharisees, but precisely on the important issue of purity there was a fundamental disagreement, and this led to conflict between Jesus and some key representatives of the pharisaic movement.
For
more information on the Pharisees, try the following links:
http://cedar.evansville.edu/~ecoleweb/articles/pharisees.html
There is something distinctive about the way Jesus heals too. He heals with a command, on his ‘own’ authority. He does not, apparently, pray for people to be healed. This may simply be an oversight on the part of the Evangelists, but this seems unlikely in view of the fact that Jewish parallels to the Gospel miracle stories always have the healer pray to God for the person who is sick to be healed. The fact that this detail seems to be universally mentioned in other stories, and universally absent from Jesus’ healings, cannot be without significance. [See the parallels (especially item #113) on the following web page: http://religion.rutgers.edu/iho/prayer.html#sons] Jesus does not just have the usual authority of one who relates to God as ‘son’ and dares to ask what others would not; Jesus has a delegated authority of his own (as is indicated in Matthew 8:8-9, and as will also be emphasized in the next chapter, in Matthew 9:6-8). Even ancient ‘magicians’ invoked some power outside themselves (calling on the name of a divine power in multiple names and mysterious gibberish like ‘abracadabra’ – the sort of babbling that Jesus is said to denounce in Matthew 6:7). But the leper recognizes that if Jesus wants to, he has power to heal, and Jesus does not deny this. This is certainly striking, and shows that Jesus is understood to be empowered by the Spirit of God and to accomplish miracles by this power (as Matthew 12:28 makes explicit). He thus has no need to ask for power from heaven, nor to invoke angelic names as others did in casting out demons. His association with the Spirit is ongoing, and thus so is his anointing and authority to accomplish these wondrous feats.
In touching the leper, Jesus has overstepped the boundaries of ritual purity. This is probably one of the reasons he tells the man to keep it a secret precisely how he was healed. It is the issue of uncleanness that torments the woman with a hemorrhage in chapter 9, and that makes her desperate to be healed and yet terrified of being found out that she had touched Jesus’ clothing. This ignoring of ritual purity raises yet again the question of Jesus’ attitude to the Jewish Law. And it is for this reason that the command to go offer the sacrifice specified by Moses is made (Matthew 8:4). But what does it mean to say it is a testimony ‘to them’? Does this imply a recognition that such sacrifices are not really necessary? In Leviticus 13-14, only the priest has the God-given authority to pronounce that God has healed someone. Jesus as the Messiah also has such God-given authority, but it would not be helpful for word to spread that a man who was a source of uncleanness had intermingled again with the population without being officially declared clean by the priest. And so he is to bring the required sacrifice, not because it is necessary in view of his being healed and declared clean by the Spirit-empowered Messiah, but ‘as a testimony to them.’ Perhaps the idea of testimony also has an additional aspect: if the priests do declare the man clean, then they should therefore also recognize Jesus’ healing power and no longer persist in unbelief (so Davies & Allison, vol.2, p.16).
A centurion whose servant is ill comes to Jesus for help. The Greek word pais like the Aramaic talya’ can mean either ‘son’ or ‘servant’, but the latter seems more likely to be the meaning here. The centurion calls Jesus ‘Lord’, the proper form of address from Matthew’s perspective, and his words a little later will show that he not only calls Jesus ‘Lord’ but recognizes what the implications are in some detail! At any rate, he communicates to Jesus that his servant is paralyzed and suffering. Jesus says “I shall come and heal him” (or possibly “Shall I come and heal him?”, which would show the hesitation (characteristic of Jesus in Matthew) to go to anyone other than the lost sheep of Israel). The centurion, perhaps realizing the attitude of Jews to unclean Gentiles, and not knowing of Jesus’ touching of the man with eczema and its implications, declares himself unworthy to have Jesus come under his roof. He then expresses his great confidence in Jesus’ ability and authority in two ways. First, he declares that Jesus need only speak a word and his servant will recover. Second, he makes a comparison between Jesus and himself. The centurion can simply command a subordinate to do his bidding, not just because of his own personal authority but because the whole authority of the Roman Empire and Emperor are behind him, and more to the point above him in the chain of command. He thus recognizes that in the same way Jesus is given such great authority by God that demons and diseases will obey his commands, because they have the full authority and power of God behind them.
The significance of this is not lost on Jesus, or on Matthew. It is quite a recognition coming from someone outside the people of Israel, and without the benefit of the teachings of the Jewish Scriptures. And so it is only here in Matthew that the author describes Jesus as marveling, as genuinely astonished (in a positive way, of course). Faith and healing are closely connected, and in the only two instances in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus heals Gentiles, it is explicitly because of their great faith, a faith that is greater than what he has found in Israel, among God’s own chosen people.
The reply of Jesus is that many shall come from the East and the West, taking their place at the table with Abraham and the other patriarchs at the messianic banquet, while some of Abraham’s own physical descendents will be cast out. Matthew’s version seems almost to suggest that the whole present generation of ethnic Israel will be rejected and replaced by Gentiles; but surely this is simply a result of his use in 8:11-12 of a Q saying (found also in Luke 13:28-29) in a new context. Originally, those from ‘the East and the West’ would perhaps have referred to the regathering of the Diaspora, while in contrast those who live in privilege in the land of Israel and who do not respond to Jesus’ teaching will be cast out. But the reference to ‘East and West’ is reminiscent of ‘the ends of the earth’, and so it was natural for Matthew to apply it to those who are not Israelites scattered to various places, but actually from the East and the West. At any rate, this is a good example of the way individual sayings of Jesus were transmitted and repeated in a number of new and different contexts, and these new contexts led to the meaning of the sayings themselves being adapted, applied, and transformed in new and creative ways. In its present context, it does not mean that all the sons of the kingdom (i.e. the ethnic people of Israel) will be cast out, any more than it means that everyone from the East and the West will come. The black-and-white language should not be pressed too far. Its point is clear in this context: Gentiles are showing faith that many in Israel lack. Those who are ethnically part of Israel should not presume on God’s grace and favor on the basis of heredity alone.
OK, I’m being facetious. But this story does illustrate an important fact, namely that ancient narratives tend not to mention women. And so the fact that the wives of Peter and the other disciples are not mentioned explicitly in the Gospels does not in any way indicate that they were all unmarried. To argue on the basis of the failure of a piece of ancient literature to mention women that women were not present is precisely the sort of argument from silence that does not work. And so here we learn not just of another healing performed by Jesus, but also that Peter was married.
Here Matthew presents Jesus’ activity as a healer and exorcist as fulfilling Scripture. This, as we’ve already seen, is a typical feature of Matthew’s Gospel. It is striking that one of the few explicit uses of Isaiah 53 in the New Testament in relation to Jesus is used in relation to his healing ministry, rather than to some sort of transactional understanding of his death in terms of penal substitution. It is a topic that we cannot go into here, but if we assume Matthew was aware of the broader context of Isaiah 53, in which the servant is explicitly named ‘Israel’, then here too we would see Matthew interpreting Jesus as fulfilling the role that Israel ideally should have as set forth in the Jewish Scriptures. In Isaiah 40-55, the ‘Servant’ appears to shift back and forth between Israel who are downcast and uncertain and not living up to their calling, and Israel who has a mission to Israel and as light to the nations. The latter is presumably the righteous remnant, and it is striking to note that Ezekiel and Jeremiah suggest that those who went into exile were in fact the elite, those who perhaps least deserved to go, while many who remained in the land became cocky and thought ‘Good, God finally got rid of those sinners.’ This is the idea behind Isaiah 53, where the righteous remnant bears the curse of exile on behalf of the people as a whole. It is precisely this same curse of exile that New Testament authors understood Jesus to have borne, dying on a Roman cross. And N. T. Wright would argue that this understanding was central even to Jesus himself. And so Matthew’s use of Isaiah 53 is once again difficult to understand from our standpoint and can look more like reading into Scripture than a legitimate interpretation thereof. However, a closer examination reveals that yet again Matthew understands Jesus’ fulfillment of Scripture as his fulfilling the role that Israel ideally should have fulfilled, as presented in the Scriptures.
This saying includes the first use by Jesus in Matthew of the phrase so typical of him, namely ‘son of man’. The basic meaning of the phrase is ‘human being’. However, any study of the contexts in which the phrase is used soon shows clearly that ‘human being’ is not an adequate translation in many contexts. To use the present saying as an example, to state that ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but a human being has no place to lay his head’ is simply untrue: human beings are just as capable (if not more!) of building a place to live as a bird or a fox is! And so another possibility is that ‘the son of man’ essentially means ‘this man’ which can be a way of referring to oneself. In this case, the reference would be explicitly to Jesus, and he would be saying essentially that following him means giving up not just whatever human luxury they had, but even things that animals take for granted.
Elsewhere, ‘the Son of Man’ is used in Matthew and other early Christian literature with Daniel 7 particularly in view. In contexts where thrones and clouds are mentioned, the reference to ‘the Son of Man’ means essentially “the particular human being whom you’ve read about in Daniel 7 (and by Matthew’s time perhaps also in 1 Enoch).” Matthew may well have read all uses of ‘Son of Man’ by Jesus in light of this particular aspect and nuance of the phrase.
T. W. Manson (The Sayings of Jesus, London: SCM, 1937, pp.72-73) makes a very interesting suggestion regarding this saying. He notes that ‘birds of the air’ are at times symbolic of the Gentile nations in Jewish literature, and that ‘fox’ was applied to Herod by Jesus (Luke 13:32), and may have been a term used more generally for the Ammonites and Idumeans (Herod the Great being only half Jewish). In this case, the saying could also have a political aspect: In the land of Israel, you have room for Gentiles (perhaps in particular Romans) and Idumean half-breeds, but no room for the true Israel spoken of in Daniel 7. And so if you want to be graciously accepted, go to them, for they are in the present time the brokers of power, influence, wealth, and comfort. Following Jesus, on the other hand, means danger and self-denial. This is, of course, highly speculative, but it is a genuinely possible interpretation and is worthy of consideration. The trouble is recognizing the extent to which certain political symbols were well known. That people told jokes about their leaders, and used veiled language to keep out of trouble when doing so in a public setting, is highly likely (one thinks of the jokes told about the communist authorities in the former Easter Bloc countries). And so it is at least possible that Jesus was saying the first century Jewish equivalent of someone in America today saying “You have room in this country for donkeys, and room for elephants, but no room for a bald eagle.” (On this saying, see further Kenneth Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980, pp.24-25). At any rate, the meaning of the saying suggests that those who follow Jesus will have to give up certain things. Will they actually be homeless at times? Presumably Jesus and his followers may not have all received hospitality in a particular area, and would have spent the night in the open. Did they have to do this often? It is hard to say.
At any rate, there is perhaps also an allusion to the idea of Wisdom not finding a place to dwell on earth, and thus returning to heaven, as is found in 1 Enoch 41:1-2: